The Meadow (54 page)

Some witnesses, Sukhnoi residents or those from nearby villages, believed that the kidnappers’ commander, the Turk, was infuriated by the Norwegian’s last attempted break for freedom, having already become agitated by the near-continuous presence of the all-seeing eye of the Indian helicopter above Sukhnoi. The same story came back
from Agent A, the Pakistani militant who had been put to work as a double agent. He claimed that the regular, distant whirr of rotor blades had gone on ‘for more than two months’, and had got the whole village on edge. After Ostrø broke free to signal to the helicopter, villagers had watched, horrified, as the Turk took hold of him, telling him in a language he could not speak, ‘
Tum bhi bahut zahmat ho
.’ You are too much trouble. Then the militant leader had appeared to become calm. ‘I’m setting this one free,’ he announced. He left with Hans Christian the next morning, 11 August, accompanied by two
dards
, nomadic hunters, and several clanking bags of provisions. After they were gone, a villager overheard the four remaining hostages being told by Qari Zarar, al Faran’s Kashmiri deputy commander, that their friend was being set free ‘as a goodwill gesture’ and because ‘he was too much of a handful to keep captive’.

The Squad pieced together Ostrø and the Turk’s movements, their sources supplying piecemeal accounts from the length of the dangerous Warwan, drawing out good intelligence from increasingly open villagers, convincing evidence that a rescue was possible – if there was the political will. For now, they mapped the Turk and his small procession as they made their way south, following the line of the Mariev Sudher River as it rushed through the valley. First they had passed through the village of Rikanwas, a forty-minute walk to the south, which remained bathed in warm sunlight for an hour after Sukhnoi fell into freezing shadows. Following narrow, stone-walled paths that wove across the steep ups and downs of the basin, they had then passed through topsy-turvy Gomry, reached by an ancient bridge held up by columns of wobbling boulders, and then down into a deep gully the churning river had cut into the valley floor, its water-smoothed stone banks rising like the bowed sides of an enormous tanker. Three hours into the walk they had climbed a path that passed the walled village of Afti, then up and down several more calf-straining inclines towards Basmina, a fortified stone-and-wood hamlet lying near the valley bottom.

They trekked beside the river for another hour before stopping briefly to take on water and bread in lonely Chordramun, where
wooden guttering diverted rivulets throughout the village, giving each house running water. By this stage, twelve miles south of Sukhnoi, all was not well in the party, according to one shepherd who saw them. He had been astounded by the sight of a blond Westerner being pulled along the path by a ‘furious’ militant commander: ‘The
angresi
was shouting and resisting, while being hauled like a calf.’ A farmer was also shocked to see ‘a guest
mujahideen
fighter dragging along a foreigner, his wrists bound with twine’. After Chordramun, the group had left the river, and shepherds spotted them setting off to the west, scrambling up the steep scree-and-grass bank of the Warwan and into a dense forest, following a path that local nomads rarely used, before disappearing over the high ground and into the snow, heading in the direction of Vail Nagbal. There, the Squad knew, having read DSP Haider’s report, two days later, on 13 August, Hans Christian Ostrø was beheaded.

Villagers who still live in the Warwan recall that the Turk arrived back in Sukhnoi, alone, on 14 August, ‘sullen and irritable’. His comrades already knew what he had done. Qari Zarar, the al Faran deputy commander, was ‘screaming’. The discovery of Hans Christian Ostrø’s headless body was all over BBC World Service, he said, with reports highlighting how the killers had incised the name ‘al Faran’ across his chest. Was the Turk insane? Qari Zarar was overheard repeating a line from the radio over and again: ‘Global condemnation of the violent men behind such a brutal killing’. A blazing row flared up between him and the Turk, with residents taking shelter, afraid that one would kill the other and then slaughter any witnesses. ‘How can this help us achieve our aims, getting our leaders freed?’ Qari Zarar was heard to bellow. ‘It makes us look like dogs!’

No one could bring themselves to tell the remaining hostages the truth, villagers said later, with the kidnappers maintaining the charade that Ostrø had been released. But with the members of al Faran now deeply divided, their heads hung low, everyone in Sukhnoi suspected that Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk understood something terrible had happened to Hans Christian. While the hostages dealt with that knowledge in whatever way they were able, the Movement in Pakistan
publicly distanced itself from the Turk, releasing a press statement condemning the killing and even ‘the militant group that had seized [Ostrø]’, to which it claimed ‘no allegiance’. Was al Faran now out on its own, the Squad wondered.

In Sukhnoi, the nervous kidnappers debated what to do. From the Movement’s heartland high in the wooded Anantnag hills, the Squad’s agents MAT (the former hospital canteen manager) and MMS (the young police constable) reported back to Crime Branch that in the days after Ostrø’s death, al Faran’s commanders mounted a damage-limitation exercise. Sikander had sent furious messages over the Line of Control to his contacts in Pakistan, complaining about the behaviour of his commander, ‘a man he had never trusted’. Now he sought advice on ‘managing’ the disaster. ‘We need to act. What should I do?’ Sikander asked in coded communications sent from his hideout, thought by the Squad to be a safe house just outside Anantnag. Indian signals intelligence intercepted some of the calls to and from Sikander, a barrage of rebukes and recriminations, and some advice. ‘
Madarchod!
[Motherfuckers] We’re losing this game all on our own, portraying ourselves like common
darshit gar
[terrorists],’ a known ISI ‘voice’ in Pakistan said. ‘Stay put. Do not travel to the Warwan. We don’t need another brother getting sucked into this mess.’

The Squad knew it needed to do something before the remaining hostages fell victim to the emerging divisions in the kidnappers’ camp and the rage of the Movement’s ISI sponsors. Al Faran was disintegrating. Political will in Pakistan was ebbing. ‘In these conditions Pakistan is liable to conceal all clues of its involvement and burn the whole operation,’ thought one Squad veteran. The lives of the hostages hung by a thread. But before it could make any contingency plans the Squad lost its eyes.

Agent A went missing. He failed to turn up at a prearranged rendezvous with his Crime Branch handler at the southern end of the Warwan. Soon after, the Squad received reports of a firefight between a Rashtriya Rifles unit patrolling near Inshan and unidentified ‘Pakistani militants’. Afterwards, the army, following normal procedure, handed over a body to the police at Anantnag. The Squad
identified the dead man as Agent A, and sent a sombre report up the line: Agent A’s double dealing had been rumbled, the ISI having worked out that he was in the pay of India. ‘Rather than bloodying themselves, the ISI, posing as Kashmiri villagers, had contacted the Rashtriya Rifles base to report a Pakistan spy in the valley, giving away his rendezvous spot,’ the Squad reported bitterly. ‘Indian soldiers were waiting for our agent when he arrived, not knowing he was one of ours.’

The death of Agent A was a body blow, but it got Squad leader Mushtaq Sadiq thinking about the mess of Kashmir. He dwelled on India’s secret surveillance of Sukhnoi, its apparent tactic of keeping the kidnappers deliberately penned in, and how Pakistan had hoodwinked the Indian security forces into killing their own agent. India and Pakistan fought each other in the valley by manipulating the lives of others. Everything that happened here involved acts of ventriloquism, with traitors, proxies and informers deployed by both sides, and civilians becoming the casualties. Veterans like him and his counterparts in Pakistan called it ‘the Game’. One leading hand in the Squad said: ‘Pakistan tried something, India blocked it and turned it around, or the other way around, and there were so many angles to it, that really when you were playing it you forgot yourself completely, until it seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.’

The overarching strategy of the Game, the detective said, was to use any means necessary to sow confusion, hatred and suspicion between the different religions, races and competing militant outfits in Kashmir, so that no one group dominated, and all remained weaker than India’s security forces. But the Game went far beyond the age-old tactic of divide and rule: ‘We slandered and manipulated. We placed words into someone else’s mouth to poison friendships. We created false fronts, fictitious outfits, to commit unthinkable crimes. We tapped phones, listened in to illicit lovers and blackmailed them. There was no moral compass. The Game had absolutely no boundaries, and this was something you only came to realise once you were no longer in it. And then you would stand back, sickened by what you had done.’

Soldiers, policemen and spies, the constitutional guardians of the state, became killers or hired them, disguising themselves as Islamic militants or Kashmiri political activists to spill the blood of soft targets, blackening the name of the freedom movement: ‘Massacres in a village, rapes at night of women fetching water, morale-sapping shootings and bombings that targeted lawyers, journalists, trade unionists and philanthropists in the high street, their offices or homes. Some of it was accidental, but most of it was done to inflame, poison, erode and terrify all residents.’

There were no rules, only outcomes. The result was a permanent, rumbling chaos in the valley that both prevented Pakistan or the Kashmiris from moulding a resistance that was capable of capturing the state from India, and stopped India from imposing a profound enough peace to be able to incorporate the state into its union.

The Squad began to wonder whether the Indian response to the kidnappings was in some way a part of the Game, a reaction to Pakistan’s sponsoring of the terrorist incident. It had happened before, back in June 1994, when Indian intelligence had made a few daring and brutal moves during the Housego/Mackie hostage crisis that had jeopardised the whole operation to free them, but that were later claimed to have been justified since they almost extinguished the militancy in south Kashmir.

Since 1989 the south of the valley had been increasingly dominated by two militant outfits. The home-grown Kashmiri rebels of Hizbul Mujahideen, generously backed by the ISI and steered by Sunni clerics in Pakistan, competed for dominance with the Movement (Pakistan-born, but having recruited Sikander and other Kashmiris to give it grassroots credibility). Alarmed at the power wielded by these two outfits, which had made the region’s main town, Anantnag, and the hills that ringed it ungovernable, the IB tried to penetrate both in order to set one against the other. Eventually Indian intelligence turned a senior field commander in HM, known as ‘Umar’. As the kidnappings of Kim Housego and David Mackie were unfolding, Umar was fed false intelligence that the Movement’s key spiritual advisor in Anantnag, Qazi Nisar, was stealing money from his own mosque,
while collaborating with India to actively canvass against the militancy. The embezzlement allegation was an outright lie, but was particularly damaging for an ascetic cleric. The collaboration claim was subtler, and far harder to refute, as it relied on a nasty distortion of the truth.

Cleric Qazi Nisar, who was much respected by Sikander, had been persuaded by the Housego family to intercede to get Kim and David Mackie freed. Twisting this out of context, Umar passed on the false charges against Qazi Nisar to the HM command. Hardliners there ruled that the much-respected holy man was a treacherous double-dealer, and ordered his execution. A few days later, on 19 June 1994, Umar carried out the cleric’s killing, bringing a shocked Anantnag to a standstill. Following orders from his Indian handlers, Umar called Kashmiri journalists like the BBC’s Yusuf Jameel and blamed the murder on Sikander, telling them that he had been angered at Qazi Nisar’s meddling in the kidnapping. Since the Movement was known locally to be responsible for the Housego/Mackie abductions, this claim appeared credible, and Sikander was widely blamed, threatening to wipe out his standing in the district that was his power base. As hundreds of thousands of people massed for Qazi Nisar’s funeral, distraught at the killing of such a holy man, the Movement, understanding the danger it was in, declared war on HM for framing it. According to a Squad veteran, ‘The Indian security forces sat back to watch the slaughter, months of tit-for-tat killings exploding in the district that drained HM and sapped the Movement, getting rid of a troublesome cleric along the way.’ Having lost its intermediary, the operation to free the two Western hostages almost collapsed. Only the perseverance of David Housego saved the day, as he struggled relentlessly to find new ways to pressure the Movement into releasing his teenage son.

Whether it was the recent death of Agent A, or the setting-up of Qazi Nisar, the simple truth was that every tragedy that struck the benighted valley was contrived or manipulated by either India or Pakistan. The Squad veteran concluded: ‘For the security forces, winning the war in Kashmir, playing the Game, came before everything else, including the lives of a few unimportant backpackers.’

Pakistan had already played its hand in the current operation, backing the Movement. The Squad was certain, too, that the ISI had helped to form and equip al Faran. Islamabad was keen to see India squirm as it tried to defuse the resulting hostage crisis, drawing international attention to the Kashmir imbroglio, which garnered few global headlines these days. ‘Then it had been India’s turn to play,’ a Squad officer said. ‘India responded chaotically at first, letting the abduction meander on while the pilgrimage to the ice cave was concluded.’ New Delhi only turned its attention to the captives in the mountains in August, and then took every opportunity to focus worldwide attention on Pakistan’s responsibility for the kidnappings, with Islamabad labelled as ‘the architect of terror in the valley’. Every day the abduction was allowed to continue, another statement came from New Delhi haranguing Islamabad in a rolling propaganda offensive that made Pakistan increasingly uncomfortable. Thinking about the Indian helicopter above Sukhnoi that watched everything and did nothing, the Squad sent a report along these lines to the higher-ups: ‘Are we still trying to rescue the hostages? Or does the state have another plan?’